City by City

Harvard Book Store welcomes co-editor STEPHEN SQUIBB for a discussion of the book City by City: Dispatches from the American Metropolis, published by FSG and n+1. Stephen is joined by contributors GREG AFINOGENOV, DAN ALBERT, and ANNIE WYMAN.

Edited by Keith Gessen and Stephen Squibb, City by City is a collection of essays—historical, personal, and somewhere in between—about the present and future of American cities. It sweeps from Gold Rush, Alaska, to Miami, Florida, encompassing cities large and small, growing and failing. These essays look closely at the forces—gentrification, underemployment, politics, culture, and crime—that shape urban life. They also tell the stories of citizens whose fortunes have risen or fallen with those of the cities they call home.

A cross between Hunter S. Thompson, Studs Terkel, and the Great Depression-era WPA guides to each state in the Union, City by City carries this project of American storytelling up to the days of our own Great Recession.

Stephen Squibb’s work as a writer and/or an editor has appeared in or online at Artforum, e-flux journal,Modern Painters, Monthly Review, Jacobin, n+1, T Magazine and Art Agenda, where he is a contributing editor. He is editor, with Khalil Rabah, of the Summer 2011 newsletter for the Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind, with Keith Gessen, of City by City:Dispatches from the American Metropolis, (FSG), and, with Adam Pendleton, of the Black Dada Reader (Mousse). He is a PhD candidate in the English Department at Harvard University.

Annie Julia Wyman is a graduate student in the Harvard Department of English, where she studies comedy. She is a former editor at McSweeney's and the former publisher of the American Reader. Her writing has appeared widely in print and online.

Dan Albert is a freelance writer based in Marblehead. He writes on business, science, and cars. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Michigan where he studied roads and cars and American life.

Greg Afinogenov is completing his PhD in Russian history at Harvard. His writing has appeared on the n+1 and Bookforum websites and in the London Review of Books.